January 2016 Newsletter

Introduction

My compatriots and I have TAKEN CONTROL of a storage shed behind
DreamHost's offices to protest their oppressive and unjust support of
cat pictures on the Internet!

Simply put, there are far too many of them, and DreamHost has enabled
these vile photos to spread disproportionately in relation to dog
pictures, which are truly an under-represented minority on the Internet.

We are dog lovers! We will not be swayed from our mission!

CANINUS INFINITUM!

We intend to stay in this shed for as long as it takes DreamHost to
understand the TRUTH of their actions and the UNAMERICANNESS of it all!

While many of our fellow canine enthusiasts have told us to go home, you
should pay them no mind. We definitely are not. They are...misinformed
about the importance of our mission.

They don't understand that we do this for ALL dog lovers who lack the
time, the energy, or the semiautomatic weapons to stand up against web
host oppression!

We stand for them! At some point a line must be drawn in the sand, and
we have drawn it!

Cats are the worst! DREAMHOST ARE YOU LISTENING!?!?

We're going to stay here as long as it takes. Days. Weeks. Months!

We're not going home until we run out of snacks. Which we're
dangerously close to doing. Please, send snacks.

Encrypted Website Traffic - FREE!

We told you about this last month, and it's finally here!

Prior to early December 2015, if you wanted to encrypt your website's
traffic, you needed to shell out some dough for what's called a "secure
certificate". This certificate, issued by a trusted third party, would
then be installed on your site to confirm to its visitors that you are,
in fact, who you say you are.

In December a project called "Let's Encrypt" came along, promising to
issue these certificates - free of charge - to *anyone* requesting them.

Encrypting your website traffic is like getting vaccinated - there is no
downside, and any purported links to autism can be easily and thoroughly
debunked by science! You do it to protect not only yourself, but also
the privacy rights of that burgeoning herd of biomass we call humanity.

DreamHost has now fully integrated Let's Encrypt's functionality into
our control panel. What does that mean for you? It means you can now
enable security on your website (aka: HTTPS, aka: "that little green
lock in your browser") by clicking a single checkbox in your control
panel!

Google announced - way back in 2014 - that they're using HTTPS as a
ranking signal. Google's search results will favor encrypted sites over
those that are insecure, and the weighting that secure sites are given
will only increase over time.

Quick Question!

DreamHost WTF: Cron Jobs!

If you're a software developer, or if you've spent any amount of time
around a command line, you're likely already familiar with Cron. If
not, let me give you the down-low.

Cron is a time-based job-scheduling system. It allows you to automate
the issuance of repetitive commands at regular intervals.

(Issuance is a word. I looked it up.)

Anything that you'd throw down on a command line with your own two hands
can be scheduled to run as frequently as you'd like with Cron jobs.

Creating Cron jobs can be a tricky affair, requiring you to edit config
files and learn proper syntax. While you can certainly do it that way,
at DreamHost we've taken things a step further and have built a pretty
web GUI to make using Cron much, much easier.